Aircooled VW South Africa

A little more progress on the project. The replacement gearbox is ready for its axle tubes. I have fitted new selector shaft bushed and seal in the replacement nose cone and a new input shat seal.
Time is my biggest problem with this project so I plan on doing some serious work on it in the December holidays where I can remove the body, strip the old chassis and transplant everything on the new chassis.
For October and November I'm going to see what small things I can do on this project, I might focus on the remaining body work.

At long last some good progress was made on this project.
I removed the body and placed it on the homemade body trolley and have started repairing the rust on the front firewall area.
The chassis also got a nice coat of rubberized underbody sealant.
This past good Friday was a 14 hr day working on the baja, I stripped the old rotted chassis and built up the refurbished chassis to a rolling chassis.
This was hard work with me being a one man band and having to finish it that Friday so the other car could park back in the garage.
Cleaned and painted gearbox in it's new home with new mounts all around.
Next up is the braking system total redo, I have made new metal brake pipes and have all new brake parts waiting(new master and wheel cylinders, all new rubber hoses etc)
Engine is patiently waiting to get reinstalled.

The baja bug chronicles continue.

Progressing young man !! good for you
Question,... did you remove the axles from the box ? if so did a "normal" circlip pliers do the trick ???
regard Haans

Haans wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2026 10:27 pm Progressing young man !! good for you
Question,... did you remove the axles from the box ? if so did a "normal" circlip pliers do the trick ???
regard Haans

Yes the axles were removed from the gearbox when I got it but I did remove the axles from the old gearbox. I used some long nose internal circlip pliers, see pic, you really need the right ones to make the job easy. I really battled to get the axle side gears out, I found out that the circlip had made a raised lip in their grooves so had to carefully dremel the raised lip off. The circlip are a lot easy to remove than install but I eventually got it all back together.

most likely I'll have to brush up on my "sanitized" vocabury before this will be done.
A swop of this sort is slowly coming into focus,.....need some longer legs !!
thanks Haans

Some more progress on the baja, I started with the braking system, the rear brake pipes and hoses are all fitted, passenger side rear brakes fitted with new shoes, new wheel cylinders fitted on the rear, new master cylinder fitted. Next time I will fit the new front brake pipes, hoses and wheel cylinders along with fitting the good s/h front brake drums plus new front wheel bearings. I also want to finish the rust repairs on the body, mainly on the front firewall and on the back seat area plus the inner front wheel wells. I am starting to feel positive about this project because at long last progress is getting made and I can see it